Start Working On Your Goals: How to not let fear get in the way.

There comes a point where we all have to stop planning and start doing. I have been planning to have a weblog for months but never got myself to do it until now. I guess it's because the realization that we all have so much we want to do, accomplish and experience but never really get to it has been eating at me for too long. Admittedly, I have always been aware that until I do something about my aspirations then that is all they ever will be but I guess I am not so comfortable with not seeing my plans through anymore. In light of that brief introduction, hey, welcome to my blog! And thank you for taking the time to read this.

I don't know if like me you have a lot of things that you want to do and goals that you want to see come to pass but for the sake of what some would call a meaningful or purposeful life, I hope you do. Personally, I want to write books, have a PhD and become an entrepreneur among a bunch of other things. Until today, I also had a weblog as a goal but it feels pretty good to know that I took the necessary steps to make it a reality.

I cannot begin to lie and say that whenever I want to do something it's easy for me to just get up and do it. Like many people, I struggle so much with just starting. It could be anything from getting started on my school assignments, going for my driving lessons or even just the first deposit into a savings plan. The world is equally filled with excuses that we can use to validate our failure to launch as much as it is with the right opportunities to just go for it. Until we give into the latter as opposed to excuses, we will always be overwhelmed with a longer list of things we are yet to do than things we have already done.

Depending on our respective situations, we all at one point or another experience one or more subjective factors that get in our way of taking that first step in our planned journeys of thousand miles. We will have a series of blogs dealing with each of the three obstacles that frequent my life, making it hard for me to start working towards my goals and a few techniques that I apply to overcome them. Maybe as you go through them you might find some elements to which you relate. These are

• Fear

• Procrastination and

• Lack of motivation.

So let's start off with:

FEAR.

We all experience fear at some point in life. It could be triggered by a lot of things including real or imagined threat of physical, emotional or psychological harm. A good example of the type of fear that cripples us from achieving our goals is the fear of failure. Also known as, atychiphobia, fear of failure is an example of fear that usually results from imagined psychological or even emotional harm. It causes us to put off tasks or to shy away from hard tasks in the name of potentially having an unsuccessful outcome. I am sure we can all relate to having experienced the fear of failure at some point in our lives.

There are also other fears that are less common among people. I have a fear of cars, particularly the fear of driving. It comes from the perceived threat of physical harm not just to me, but others as well because I have always imagined that if I were to drive I am bound to cause a bad accident. This fear immobilized me completely from learning to drive though getting a license is on my goals’ list. What has the fear stopped you from trying?

What can you do about this?

Herold B Walker says "the only true failure lies in the failure to start". If this makes sense to you like it does to me then we can agree that succumbing to the fear of failure is where the failure lies. Another important thing is to learn to look at failure in a different light. Instead of looking at failure as something to be scared of or as evidence of how inadequate we are, we can try looking at fear instead as a learning experience. The only way to really learn from something is to actually do it. And if you once overcame your fear and ‘failed’ on the first attempt and you feel like quitting, don’t!, for quitting is failure. Just re-overcome that fear, get the lessons, get wiser and re-attempt.

Remember, it is completely natural to feel fear. However, the outcome we imagine in our heads is never really the outcome that we get and in all honesty, how many of us can testify that the worst-case scenario is usually much calmer than the amount of fear with which we look at things. That is why regardless of my fear of driving, I know I have to and I am going to take driving lessons and drive a car. If I let the fear stop me from doing anything then I will always be the girl who can't drive and that's scarier to me than learning how to drive. So fearful or not, take that first step into doing what needs to be done towards attaining that degree, getting that license, venturing into that business and anything you put your mind to.

Next on the line is procrastination. Did you just think about the interrelationship between Fear and Procrastination? Read more on my next blog!!!!